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While U.S. stocks have enjoyed a strong year, gold appears on track for its first calendar-year loss since the year 2000.

Indeed, the metal fell another 2.5% Wednesday, to a four-month low, after minutes of the Federal Reserve's October meeting showed the central bank could start scaling back monetary stimulus at one of their next few meetings. The inflation-fighting implications of tighter money is generally viewed as bad for the price of gold, a hard asset which is viewed as a bulwark against rising inflation.

Financial Times

As the FT pointed out, the latest Fed-minutes news "pushed many miners' prices, relative to their book values, back towards the multiyear lows seen in June when the metal first plunged on taper talk."

Indeed, this year's selloff has left gold miners' undervaluation, relative to global equities, "at its most extreme since 2000, according to East Spring Investments. Australian miners, for example, are trading at about 70 per cent of book value even after hefty writedowns," writes FT.

To be sure, the column, like virtually every Lex column, has us hungering for added detail: In this case, a list of particular miners and more valuation specifics would be nice. But while lacking in specifics, this column might be on to something.

In case you weren't aware, while it's been a bad year for the champions of recently launched health-care reform, it's been a great year for health insurers that will continue to serve up policies in the era of Obamacare.

CNNMoney

"Wall Street expects that to continue because Obamacare should lead to more individuals getting coverage from the Big Five," La Monica writes. "And making health insurance available to a wider swath of the population is the president's main goal after all."

Looks like Obamacare would be the ultimate insurance policy for these big insurers, particularly once a few technological problems are cleaned up.

If you think that questions related to asset allocation and rebalancing are at least as important to your investment future than what securities to buy – and you're a fool to think otherwise – then read a piece penned by Michael Santoli, a columnist with Yahoo! Finance and a former Barron's scribe.

Santoli wrote a short profile of Wealthfront, an upstart wealth-management firm based in Silicon Valley that "has signed on outsized number of early Twitter employees as clients."

Wealthfront is clearly not your father's brokerage. The firm manages money in a very different way than most Wall Street brokerages or wealth managers.

For example, Santoli writes, software is always monitoring customer accounts, rebalancing among the funds daily and opportunistically collecting interim losses to offset taxable gains. "The firm estimates its tax-optimization system can add an average of one percentage point to annual returns, net of commissions," he writes.

And Wealthfront's chief investment officer is none other than Burton Malkiel, the Princeton professor and author of the seminal investment book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which popularized the efficient-market hypothesis. Malkiel believes in focusing on the three things under an investor's control: diversification, low fees and minimizing taxes.

For any investor who thinks of rebalancing as something that's done by humans quarterly or semiannually, this tech-driven approach to asset allocation is food for thought.

I'll contrast Santoli's original and timely column with a piece that I first saw posted Thursday on the MSN Money site titled "Is Dividend Investing Doomed?".

The piece makes the excellent point that even stocks that offer the security of extra cash can get bid up to ridiculous levels and often aren't the best investments. It was written by a MarketWatch columnist, Jeff Reeves, and MSN Money properly attributes the work to MarketWatch.

The problem is that the article appeared on the MarketWatch site two weeks earlier. It was certainly a timelier read then.